As medical technology has become both more complex and costly to utilize, it has become increasingly desireable to have the ability to simply, economically and accurately demonstrate or exhibit to medical professionals such as physicians and surgeons and/or to lay people such as prospective or actual patients and their families the anticipated or intended effects of therapeutically treating a body part of interest. As used herein, the term body part is intended to denote that portion of a body--typically a human or other animal body and, most especially, an internal body part--that is being or is to or may be treated by a therapeutic procedure or regimen and should be understood as including tissue, bones and organs and the like. Thus, therapeutic treatments may include, without limitation, surgical procedures, radiation therapies, drug therapies, etc. It is particularly desirable to be able to clearly display for the user the subject body part as it appears both prior to treatment and after treatment, and perhaps during treatment, often as viewed by the medical professional. In other words, an apparatus utilized for such purposes should be capable of realistically exhibiting or depicting the body part as seen or observable by the medical professional during a pretreatment examination, during a course of treatment, and/or after treatment has been completed. For example, when treating the inner ear with medication, the physician will generally employ an otoscope to view the eardrum and/or other portions of the inner ear through the auditory canal; prior to such treatment one sees, through the otoscope, the unhealthy or diseased eardrum and, after treatment, the healthy eardrum. The patient, or potential patient, on the other hand, is generally limited to viewing textbook drawings or, perhaps, nonspecific photographs of the inner ear (or other body part of interest), and often finds it difficult to comprehend or appreciate from such drawings or photographs the true nature and/or severity of the condition and the need for and/or effects of a recommended treatment. It would be beneficial and desirable to be able to exhibit, as for the patient about to undergo or considering a particular treatment, the eardrum as viewed with an otoscope through the auditory canal before, during and after the treatment, thereby providing the patient with an accurate and realistic sense of the basis for the recommendation and the intended effects of the treatment. Moreover, for certain treatments the effects exhibit themselves in various discrete stages; it would also be helpful to be able to permit the patient to view the changing appearance of the subject body part at these intermediate stages of treatment.
An apparatus constructed for providing this advantageous functionality and abilities may be utilized in numerous ways for a wide range of applications. It may, for example, be employed in the education of medical professionals--i.e. as a study aid for assisting the professional or trainee to better visualize the effects of the intended or recommended treatment on the body part of interest, particularly in the natural setting or location of the body part. Such an apparatus may also be utilized by medical product sales personnel in their sales presentations to better demonstrate the effects of their products or treatment regimens. In yet another application, such an apparatus may be employed by medical professionals to explain planned or recommended treatments to patients and their families, the intent being to educate and to reduce pretreatment patient anxiety. Other equally beneficial uses will readily suggest themselves to those involved, even peripherally, with the education of medical professionals, with the treatment of patients, and with the design, development, testing, manufacture and sales--indeed, with virtually any aspect--of medical devices and drugs and the like.
Although there have been prior efforts to provide such desireable and clearly advantageous functionality using a variety of devices and arrangements, known efforts have often been unintuitively simple, or unacceptably expensive to produce or widely distribute, complex to manufacture and too heavy and unwieldy for convenient transport to various locations for use.
Anatomical display systems as heretofore employed to depict diseased body parts as they appear before and as a result of treatment have generally been limited to the use of simple drawings or photographs of the subject body part both before and after treatment, of video recordings where possible or appropriate, or of fixed three-dimensional models. Each of these prior art approaches has various disadvantages. For example, while it is intended that such drawings or photographs accurately depict the body part of interest, they often do not provide a realistic representation of the manner in which the medical professional views the body part in actual practic. Referring once more to the example of a physician viewing the eardrum with an otoscope, a photograph of the eardrum does not provide the sense or realism of a physician utilizing an otoscope nor would adjacent or peripheral regions or tissues or structures of the inner and outer ears be viewable in the photograph while providing sufficient detail of the eardrum. Video recordings suffer from similar disadvantages and are, in addition, difficult, expensive and time consuming to prepare. Furthermore, video playback equipment--such as a video tape player and associated television monitor--are expensive, take up significant amounts of valuable and often unavailable space and are generally far too large and heavy for convenient transport from place-to-place. As such, video recordings do not lend themselves to practical use by, for example, a salesperson for demonstrating a medical product at customer locations.
A fixed three-dimensional anatomical model may be capable of demonstrating the body part of interest as it exists in a single state or condition, but cannot be employed to selectively demonstrate the body part in a variety of conditions such as prior to and after the treatment. Although a multiplicity of such three-dimensional models may be provided to overcome this deficiency, each designed and constructed to demonstrate the body part of interest at a particular phase of treatment, this approach requires one to design, construct and transport a plurality of such models at generally unacceptable cost, space requirements and inconvenience. Moreover, such models cannot, once constructed to demonstrate a particular condition or treatment, be readily adapted for use in demonstrating the effects of a variety of different treatments.